The Disconnect Between How Thin or Fit We Look and How Healthy We Actually Are

There is a disconnect between the healthy life extending benefits of physical activity and its use to look good and thin and lose weight

Bhavin Jankharia

6 Nov 2021 — 5 min read

There is a disconnect between the healthy life extending benefits of physical activity and its use to look good and thin and lose weight

There are two connected threads I want to discuss today.

The first is the intertwining of weight loss and physical activity. More and more, the goal of physically activity, whether it is via walking, running or strength training seems to be to lose weight and look good, rather than be healthy…which is quite unfortunate.

While morbid obesity is associated with a host of harmful downstream effects, physical fitness and weight loss do not necessarily go hand in hand. Typically, if you have not been active and start running or walking, you may lose a certain amount of excess weight, but once the body reaches a specific stable state that is right for you, your weight is unlikely to budge (this is the plateau as it is called), irrespective of how much more you try to be active or reduce your calorie intake or both. This often causes frustration and many people quit being active just because they don’t seem to be losing weight. You may even paradoxically put on weight, especially if you are trying to prevent loss of muscle mass and/or if increase your protein content.

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A recent review article by Glenn Gaesser and Siddhartha Angadi [1] highlights this very well. Targeting cardiorespiratory fitness increases our healthspan and lifespan much more than targeting weight loss, which in any case is tough to sustain and almost always leads to weight cycling. In short, we need to delink the two. We need to be active and fit, because physical activity is the single most important factor that helps us live long, healthy and not just as a means to losing weight.

The same day, a friend sent a video from a newsgroup called WION, in which a newscaster was loudly talking about the harm of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and other intense exercises. This was in response to an actor (Puneeth Rajkumar) in Karnataka who had dropped dead while working out. Similar comments were passed on Twitter a couple of weeks earlier when a ripped gym trainer died of Covid related complications.

Having six-packs with a beautiful body does not mean you are fit. Metabolic fitness and cardiorespiratory fitness are not the same as having a sculpted body. A person who looks like a Greek God, may still have hypertension, diabetes, high lipids and plaques in the coronary arteries and unless the person consciously takes care of their health holistically, rather than just focussing on their biceps and quads, they are also likely to run into trouble. Being fit is about having an LDL-C below 70 mg/dl, a blood pressure below 135/85, a fasting plasma glucose below 120, being able to sleep undisturbed for 7-8 hours a day, eating sensibly and screening for disease and deficiencies. If you don’t do this, even if you outwardly look like today’s generation of Bollywood actors, you are just as likely to fall sick, as a person who does not look like Mr. Universe.

Unfortunately, each time someone who seemingly seems to be the epitome of fitness drops dead, it gives a ready excuse to everyone who does not like to be physically active, to say things like, “What is the point of walking or running or going to the gym? See…they did that and still died suddenly.”

Many, many more lives are saved by physical activity than the ones apparently lost because a person seemingly overdid the physical activity (though it is also likely that that person would have died sooner or later in the same manner, anyway). And just because the incident happened at the time when the person was either running or was in the gym, does not mean that was the inciting event anyway.

The advantages of physical activty are many and I have already discussed its benefits when it comes to cardiovascular risk, high blood pressure, sleep, cognition and stroke. I will repeat what I quoted when I wrote the first article on the advantages of physical activity. As Dr. Butler said in 1978, “If physical activity could be packaged into a pill, it would be the single, most widely prescribed and beneficial medicine in the nation”.

You should be active, not because you want to look lean and mean or sculpted or have friends and family praise you for looking good, but because physical activity is the single most important factor under our control in our atmasvasth quest to live long, healthy.

Footnotes:

1. Gaesser GA, Angadi SS. iScience 2021;24,102995

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Bhavin Jankharia

Comments

Prolonged Sedentary Behavior is Harmful Even if You are Physically Active

Physical activity is the cornerstone of our atmasvasth quest to live long healthy. It is also important along with being physically active, to consciously reduce time spent being sedentary.